The Russian media, accustomed to the crude, pedestrian propaganda of their Communist youth, had been credulous babes when presented with the slick, persuasive campaigns he had mounted for Igor Komarov. Now something had gone wrong, badly wrong.
There was another voice, that of a passionate priest, echoing across Russia through the radio and television, media Kuznetsov regarded as his personal fiefdom, urging faith in a greater God and the return of another icon.
Behind the priest was the man on the telephone—he had been told of the campaign of anonymous telephone calls—whispering lies, but oh-so-persuasive lies, into the ears of senior journalists and commentators he thought he knew and owned.
For Boris Kuznetsov the answer still lay in the words of Igor Komarov, words that could not fail to convince, that had never failed.
When he entered the leader’s office he was shocked by the transformation. Komarov was behind his desk looking dazed. Spread all over the floor were the daily papers, their headlines blaring accusations upward toward the ceiling. Kuznetsov had already seen them all, the allegations about General Nikolayev, attacks and raids, gangsters and mafia money. No one had ever dared talk about Igor Komarov like that before.
Fortunately, Kuznetsov knew what had to be done. Igor Komarov must speak, and all would be well.
“Mr. President, I really must urge you to give a major press conference tomorrow.”
Komarov stared at him for several seconds as if trying to comprehend what he was saying. In his whole political career, and with Kuznetsov’s approval, he had avoided press conferences. They were unpredictable. He preferred the staged interview, with pre-submitted questions, the set speech, the prepared address, the adoring rally.
“I do not hold press conferences,” he snapped.
“Sir, it is the only way to terminate these foul rumors. The media speculation is getting out of hand. I cannot control it anymore. No one could. It is feeding on itself.”
“I hate press conferences, Kuznetsov. You know that.”
“But you are so good with the press, Mr. President. Reasoned, calm, persuasive. They will listen to you. You alone can denounce the lies and rumors.”
“What do the public opinion polls say?”
“National approval for yourself, sir, forty-five percent and falling. From seventy percent eight weeks ago. Zyuganov of the Socialist Union, thirty-three and rising. Markov, the acting president for the Democratic Alliance, twenty-two, rising slightly. That excludes the undecided. I have to say, sir, the past two days could cost another ten percent, maybe more, when the effect filters into the ratings.”
“Why should I hold a press conference?”
“It’s national coverage, Mr. President. Every major TV station will hang on each word you speak. You know when you speak, no one can resist.”
Finally Igor Komarov nodded.
“Arrange it. I will create my address myself.”
¯
THE press conference was held in the great banquet hall of the Metropol Hotel at eleven the next morning. Kuznetsov began by welcoming the national and foreign press and lost no time in pointing out that certain allegations of unspeakable foulness had been made over the preceding two days concerning the policies and activities of the Union of Patriotic Forces. It was his privilege, in offering a complete and convincing rebuttal to these ignoble smears to welcome to the podium “the next president of Russia, Igor Komarov.”
The UPF leader strode from between the curtains at the rear of the stage and walked to the lectern. He began as he always began, when speaking to rallies of the faithful, by talking about the Great Russia he intended to create once the people had honored him with the presidency. After five minutes he became disconcerted by the silence. Where was the responsive spark? Where was the applause? Where were the cheerleaders? He raised his eyes to some distant clouds and evoked the glorious history of his nation, now in the grip of foreign bankers, profiteers, and criminals. His peroration resounded through the hall, but the hall did not rise to its feet, right hands upraised in the UPF salute. When he stopped the silence continued.
“Perhaps there are questions?” suggested Kuznetsov. A mistake. At least a third of the audience comprised the foreign press. The New York Times man spoke fluent Russian, as did those from the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, CNN, and most of the rest.
“Mr. Komarov,” called out the Los Angeles Times correspondent, “I figure you have spent some two hundred million dollars on your campaign so far. That has to be a world record. Where has the money come from?”
Komarov glared at him. Kuznetsov whispered in his ear.
“Public subscriptions from the great people of Russia,” he said.
“That’s about a year’s salary for every man in Russia, sir. Where does it really come from?”
Others joined in. “Is it true you intend to abolish all opposition parties and establish a one-party dictatorship?”
“Do you know why General Nikolayev was murdered just three weeks after he denounced you?”
“Do you deny the Black Guards were behind those assassination attempts two nights ago?”
The cameras and microphones of the state TV and the two commercial networks roamed the room picking up the questions from the impertinent foreigners and the stammered answers.
The man from the Daily Telegraph, whose colleague Mark Jefferson had been gunned down the previous July, had also received an anonymous telephone call. He arose and the cameras zeroed in on him.
“Mr. Komarov, have you ever heard of a secret document called the Black Manifesto?”
There was a stunned silence. Neither the Russian media nor the foreigners knew what he was talking about. In reality, neither did he. Igor Komarov, clinging to the lectern and the remains of his self-control, went white.
“What Manifesto?”
Another mistake.
“According to my information, sir, it purports to contain your plans for the creation of a single-party state, the reactivation of the Gulag for your political opponents, rule of the country by two hundred thousand Black Guards, and the invasion of the neighboring republics.”
The silence was deafening. Forty correspondents in the hall came from Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, and Armenia. Half the Russian press supported the parties destined for abolition, with their hierarchs heading for the camps, accompanied by the press. If the Englishman was right. Everyone stared at Komarov.
That was when the real tumult began. Then he made the third mistake. He lost his temper.
“I will not stand here and listen to any more of this shit!” he screamed, and stalked from the stage, followed by the hapless Kuznetsov.
At the rear of the hall Colonel Grishin stood in the shadow of a hanging curtain and glared at the press with naked hate. Not for long, he promised himself. Not for long.
CHAPTER 19
IN THE SOUTHWESTERN CORNER OF THE CENTRAL ZONE of Moscow, in a bulge of land formed by a hairpin curve in the Moskva River, stands the medieval convent of Novodevichi and in the shadow of its walls the great cemetery.
Twenty acres of land, shaded by pine, birch, lime, and willow, play host to twenty-two thousand graves where lie the notables of Russia for two centuries.
The cemetery divides into eleven major gardens. Numbers one to four cover the nineteenth century, bounded by the walls of the convent on one side and the central dividing wail on the other.
Five to eight lie between the dividing wall and the perimeter, beyond which the trucks roar down the Khamovnitchesky Val. Here lie the great and the bad of the Communist era. Marshals, politicians, scientists, scholars, writers, and astronauts are to be found flanking the paths and lanes, their tombstones ranging from great simplicity to monuments of self-adoring grandiosity.
Gagarin the astronaut, killed flying a prototype while the worse for vodka, is here, a few yards from the round-headed stone effigy of Nikita Khrushchev. Models of airplanes, rockets, and guns test
ify to what these men did in life. Other figures stare heroically into oblivion, chests plated in granite medals.
Down the central pathway there is a further wail, penetrated by a narrow entrance and leading to three smaller gardens, numbers nine, ten, and eleven. With space at a premium there were hardly any plots left by the winter of 1999, but one had been reserved for General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev, and here on December 26 his nephew Misha Andreev buried his uncle Kolya.
He tried to make it the way the old man had asked at their last dinner together. There were twenty generals, including the Defense Minister, and one of the two Metropolitan bishops of Moscow officiated.
The whole deal, the old warrior had asked, so the acolytes swung their censers and the aromatic smoke arose in clouds into the bitter air.
The headstone was in the form of a cross, carved in granite, but there was no effigy of the dead man, just his name and beneath it the words Russky Soldat, a Russian soldier.
Major General Andreev pronounced the eulogy. He kept it short. Uncle Kolya might have wanted to go to his grave like a Christian at last, but he hated gushing words. When he was done, and while the bishop intoned the parting words, he laid the three magenta ribbons and gold discs of the Hero of the USSR on the coffin. Eight of his own soldiers of the Tamanskaya Division had acted as pallbearers, and they lowered the coffin into the ground. Andreev stood back and saluted. Two ministers and the other eighteen generals did the same.
As they walked back down the central pathway to the entrance and the cortege of waiting cars and limousines, the deputy defense minister, General Butov, put a hand on his shoulder.
“A dreadful thing,” he said. “A terrible way to go.”
“One day,” said Andreev, “I will find them and they will pay.”
Butov was clearly embarrassed. He was a political appointee, a desk jockey who had never commanded combat troops.
“Yes, well, I’m sure the militia people are doing their best,” he said.
On the pavement the generals solemnly shook his hand, one by one, then climbed into their staff cars and hurried away. Andreev found his own car and drove back to his base.
¯
FIVE miles away, as the winter light faded in the midafternoon, a short priest in cassock and stovepipe hat scurried through the snow and ducked into the onion-domed church on Slavyansky Square. Five minutes later he was joined by Colonel Anatoli Grishin.
“You seemed perturbed,” said the colonel quietly.
“I am badly frightened,” said the priest.
“Don’t be, Father Maxim. There have been reverses, but nothing I cannot take care of. Tell me, why did the Patriarch leave so suddenly?”
“I don’t know. On the morning of the twenty-first he received a phone call from Zagorsk. I knew nothing of it. The call was taken by his private secretary. The first thing I knew, I was told to pack a suitcase.”
“Why Zagorsk?”
“I found out later. The monastery had invited the preacher Father Gregor to preach the sermon. The Patriarch decided he would like to attend.”
“And thus give his personal authority to Gregor and his contemptible message,” snapped Grishin. “Without saying a word. Just being there would be enough.”
“Anyway, I asked if I would be going too. The secretary said no; His Holiness would take his private secretary and one of the Cossacks as his driver. The two nuns were given the days off to visit relatives.”
“You did not inform me, Father.”
“How could I know anyone was coming that night?” asked the priest plaintively.
“Go on.”
“Well, I had to call the police afterward. The body of the Cossack guard was lying on the upper landing. In the morning I called the monastery and spoke to the secretary. I said there had been armed burglars and a shooting, nothing else. But later the militia changed that. They said the attack had been intended for His Holiness.”
“And then?”
“The secretary called me back. He said His Holiness was deeply upset. Shattered was the word he used, mainly by the murder of the Cossack guard. Anyway, he stayed with the monks at Zagorsk through the Christmas period and came back yesterday. His principal reason was to officiate at the funeral of the Cossack before the body was returned to his relatives on the Don.”
“So he is back. You called me here to tell me that?”
“Of course not. It is about the election.”
“You have no need to worry about the election, Father Maxim. Despite the damage, the acting president will certainly be eliminated at the first round. In the runoff, Igor Komarov will still triumph over the Communist Zyuganov.”
“That’s the point, Colonel. This morning His Holiness went to Staraya Ploshad for a private meeting with the president, at his own request. It seems there were two generals of the militia present, and others.”
“How do you know?”
“He came back in time for lunch. He took it in his study alone except for his private secretary. I was serving; they took no notice of me. They were discussing the decision that Ivan Markov had finally made.”
“And that was?”
Father Maxim Klimovsky was shaking like a leaf. The flame of the candle in his hands fluttered so that its soft light danced across the face of the Virgin and Child on the wall.
“Calm yourself, Father.”
“I cannot. Colonel, you must understand my position. I have done all I could to help you, because I believe in Mr. Komarov’s vision of the New Russia. But I cannot go on. The attack on the Residence, the meeting of today … it is all becoming too dangerous.”
He winced as a steely hand gripped his upper arm.
“You are too far involved to pull out now, Father Maxim. You have nowhere else to go. On the one hand you go back to being a waiter at tables, despite the cassock and the holy orders. On the other you await the triumph in twenty-one days of Igor Komarov and myself, and you rise to undreamed-of heights. Now, what did they say at this meeting with the acting president?”
“There won’t be an election.”
“What?”
“Well, yes, there will be an election. But not with Mr. Komarov.”
“He wouldn’t dare,” whispered Grishin. “He would not dare declare Igor Komarov an unfit person. More than half the country supports us.”
“It’s got beyond that, Colonel. Apparently the generals were insistent. The killing of the old general and the attempts on the banker, the militia man, and most of all His Holiness, seem to have provoked them.”
“To what?”
“January first. New Year’s Day. They think everyone will have celebrated as usual to such a point that they will be incapable of concerted action.”
“What everyone? What action? Explain yourself, man!”
“Your everyone. Everyone you command. The action of defending yourselves. They are putting together a force of forty thousand men. The Presidential Guard, the rapid reaction forces of the SOBR and the OMON, some Spetsnaz units, the cream of the Interior Ministry troops based in the city.”
“To what end?”
“To arrest you all. Charges of conspiracy against the state. To crush the Black Guard, arrest or destroy them in their barracks.”
“They can’t. They have no evidence.”
“Apparently there is a Black Guard officer prepared to testify. I heard the secretary make the same point, and that was the Patriarch’s answer.”
Colonel Grishin stood as if he had been hit by an electric charge. Part of his brain told him these gutless freaks could not have the nerve to do any such thing. Another part told him it could be true. Igor Komarov had never deigned to descend into the bearpit of the Duma. He had remained party leader, but not a member, so he had no parliamentary immunity. Neither did he, Anatoli Grishin.
If there was really a senior Black Guard officer prepared to testify, the Moscow State Prosecutor could issue the warrants, at least long enough to hold them in detention until the election
.
As an interrogator, Grishin had seen what men were prepared to do when driven by panic; throw themselves from buildings, run in front of trains, charge barbed wire fences.
If the acting president and those around him, his own Praetorian Guard, anti-gang police generals, militia commanders, had all realized what awaited them if Komarov won, they might indeed be in that state of panic.
“Go back to the residence, Father Maxim,” he said at length, “and remember what I said. You are too far gone to seek redemption under the present regime. For you, the UPF has to win. I want to know everything that happens, all that you hear, every development, every meeting, every conference. From now until New Year’s Day.”
Gratefully the terrified priest scuttled away. Within six hours his aging mother had developed a serious case of pneumonia. He asked for and received from his kindly Patriarch leave of absence until she was recovered. By nightfall he was on the train to Zhitomir. He had done his best, he reasoned. He had done all that was asked of him, and more. But Michael and all his angels would not have kept him in Moscow a moment longer.
That night Jason Monk wrote his last message to the West. Without his computer he wrote it slowly and carefully in block capitals until it covered two sheets of foolscap paper. Then, using a table lamp and the tiny camera bought for him by Umar Gunayev, he photographed both pages several times before burning the sheets and flushing the ashes down the toilet.
In darkness he removed the unexposed film and inserted it into the tiny canister in which it was sold. It was no larger than the top joint of his little finger.
At half-past nine Magomed and his two other bodyguards drove him to the address he gave them. It was a humble dwelling, a detached cottage, or izba, far in the southeastern suburbs of Moscow in the district of Nagatino.
The old man who answered the door was unshaven, a wool cardigan wrapped around his thin body. There was no reason for Monk to know that once he had been a revered professor at Moscow University until he had broken with the Communist regime and published a paper for his students that called for democratic government.